Coping with depression and fighting for my sanity

I wish that life were simpler.  More instinctual.  A roadmap, like any set of instructions, just isn’t enough.  It can be disregarded, or worse, misinterpreted.  Just when you get to the critical part, the words get smudged out.

It is also not easy.  Life, that is.  That is possibly the most enduring of my father’s contribution to my life.  Delivered on so many occasions, already from my earliest memory, so that by the time I was five or six, I had already heard it enough.

My father was an “armchair psychologist”.  Not at all in touch with his own feelings, but able to expound at length after a few drinks.  He was a bully, and very domineering.  A narcissist.  Yes, I know what a narcissist is.  I already did when I was told that I was one too in quick succession by two people who are fond of gaslighting.  With one, I pushed back, and it cost me the relationship.  With the other, I was ready to let go.

Why is it that some people who criticise us can’t land a blow, even though they are fully armed with all of the heart-level insights that can give them perfect aim, but others, even strangers, can at times really hit deep?  It might be that with some people we have our guard up already.  With others we can see the barb being shot from a place of their own pain, so can cast it aside…but with others, strangers especially, we don’t have the context to allow us to protect ourselves.

This post isn’t about being trans, but I wonder if the energy in the community around being misgendered comes from this—as in, it hurts more when someone who doesn’t know you at all misgenders you, because it feels true, and that can hurt more when the truth is what punctures the bubble we build around ourselves.  Whereas if a family member does, sure it may feel really awful, but the truth is that it stems from a place in them that’s broken, not in you.  

My father is a champion of my transition.  I am very grateful to him for that, and also for the unstinting support and financial Armageddon that has been wrought on me by the stupid divorce process that my wife has driven us to.  Can you imagine a woman so angry that she says to our child when they lament about their own financial future (perfectly legit when the financial worries hit them personally and they are still minors), “I don’t care about the money, I just want to destroy your father.”  

They were naturally upset.  She had come to where the family home is, the home she abandoned, to eat into my precious time with the kids during a school holiday, because she’s a bully, and this is what she said.  I accept responsibility for marrying a bully.  I accept that there is something in me that makes people seem to feel okay to bully me.  What’s up with that?  

I read a wonderful book of essays recently called Girls Can Kiss Now, by Jill Gutowitz.  Actually, this was one of the books that my constellation of women protectors and guides read to me during those early days of my convalescence.  My sister had brought a book that she wanted to read to me, Sex and the City, which I would describe as coming from a place of being girls together, and how much she wanted a sister her whole life.  I discovered her during this process in ways that sisterhood is all about.

My convalescence has been the most wonderful experience.  Bizarre to think that the raging post-partum-like pain between my legs, my total physical fragility, should have brought on such bliss.  The Den Mother is fierce with me as a human and a friend.  We are close enough to have observed each other over years, also as parents, as we have co-travelled in so many ways, literally, figuratively, emotionally.  When she came to be with me and protected me, she bathed me in qualities that don’t come easy even for her…she was relentlessly caring and nurturing.

One of my most important Guides, mentors, lovers, friends, is eloquent on the subject of emotional availability.  This is the glue of female relationships.  This is a fluency that many men lack.  My father was always totally emotionally unavailable.  He was also gone.  I have no memory of him other than climbing into his car one day when he came to take me to the zoo or to a swimming pool…a place where he could be “father” and not have to pay any attention.  One memory, until I was about 8.  That’s weird.

I remember spending Christmas in Italy with him when I was 6, only I don’t remember him.  I remember his new wife, and how affectionate and warm she was, in a teasing way.  She went on to become a second mother to me, and very much still is.  Not even a scrap of memory of him.  I remember an Italian woman who sent her boyfriend/husband to sit with my siblings and who took me to sit next to her and just exuded warmth into me for the entire flight.  

My whole life has included encounters with random strangers, women.  They could see right through me, and I became a baby in front of them.  I don’t mean literally.  I mean in terms of my openness to them.  I could see something in their eyes, in their energy, and it just pops me open, and I flirt with them with all my heart, and no agenda, just love and play.  It happened sometimes with babysitters when I was little, it happened with all of the women who came to be with me for my rebirth.  And even though I am an adult, in a ballerina giraffe body, it can still happen…it happened last night.

I met a woman who has half my age, actually less, in a nightclub.  And with a certain softness in her eyes and a particular tone of voice, she had tears in my eyes in one sentence.  And without running away, she held me there, seeing me, with all the emotional connection that this takes.  It was wild.  I went from Domme to sub in one sentence.

In the Girls Can Kiss Now book the writer speaks often about being attracted to other women and that this invariably produces feelings like “I wish she would stomp on my face.”  Pretty extreme, but totally relatable.  I wanted to play last night, and I kept running away from any situation that would have gotten me to play, but with this woman, I just felt like asking “do you feel like beating me up?”

Most of the time, in these situations, I end up as the top.  Not by choice.  You can’t see me and not expect that of me.  I am reminded of when I was young, perhaps 5 or 6, and playing with the kids in the neighbourhood.  We played a game called “family”, which was basically just all of us pretending to be one big family.  I was the youngest in our friend group, but I never was the one who got to be the baby (a grave disappointment to me as someone who is quite literally a baby)…that was always a boy who triggered all of the girls in our group…he was physically smaller.  Me, I was already a swan in those days…only the ugly duckling.

My mother was a beautiful woman.  I don’t mean that as an anodyne statement, as any child would say of their mother.  My Ex-Mistress once said, “all babies think their mommies are beautiful.”  I’m not sure if that is true, it was never felt in a literal sense with my own mother, because of the awful things she did to me, but I can’t help but look at pictures of her now and see tragedy.  Her younger sister was so gorgeous she graced the covers of magazines like Vogue, Town & Country, Mademoiselle…so many.  She was a fashion icon, even the guest of a President.  But when I look at her standing next to my mother at her wedding, she is a pale shadow of what my mother was.  

But my mother never knew it.  She was an ugly duckling, a big, awkward girl who never discovered how beautiful she was.  My current obsession is female power.  What it is, where it comes from, how we handle it.  In a nutshell, it is sexual.  Female power is inherently sexual.  The stakes couldn’t be higher because it is this power that means women choose.  The entire patriarchal system is constructed upon male fear of this power, and (some) female complicity in fear over its use.

The shaming of bodies, the use of virtue as a tool to suppress women, to get them to suppress themselves, the reduction of the female essence to reproduction—these are all by-products of this male fear.  As I get to know more and more trans men (AFAB—assigned female at birth, but wishing to become men, present as male), I am enamoured with the great variety of queers out there.  I don’t have the same reaction to gay men as I do to trans men, regardless of who they like to sleep with.  Invariably, I find them hot.

One of the hot topics in politics right now is the “explosion” amongst the teen population of girls who wish to be boys and declare them as trans.  I put the word in quotes because the numbers are minuscule, only as a relative proportion of the total trans population they are a growing, even if not still quite half.  

I have written before about my experiences in trans support groups and the sharing about life, dysphoria, etc.  What has struck me from these conversations is that trans men and trans women have different root motivations in their trans-ness.  Most trans women feel that they were born in the wrong body, or that God made a mistake.  Trans men, on the other hand, seem to tend to just want to be men, and now women.

What about me?  I am like a trans man.  I rejected the masculine as a child.  I hated men because all of the men in my life were brutal to me, cruel, distant, unfeeling, or abusive.  And later, they were sexual predators.  I don’t know what causes this in men, and sadly, disturbingly, it is frighteningly common.  This is difficult.  Star Child was sure that I became trans because my mother told me she “wished I was a girl,” and this would be just another point for her—but it doesn’t resonate with me.  I feel in my bones that I was born this way…and anyway, my memories of my mother’s lament stem from later in years…though I do note that she dressed me as a girl until I was going to proper school.  Later she just claimed this was old fashioned.  I know better…

My conscious reality of being trans was built on an intense desire to be a girl.  What I wanted was to express myself as girls do, to live as girls do.  To be pretty.  And I guess, all the crap too: being objectified, being “princessed”, being seen as fragile.  That resonates to me with the trans male motive of just seeing life is greener as a man than it is as a woman.  Well, who could blame them.  In this world, men give men a bad reputation, and it isn’t founded on fakery.  The bad apples are too numerous to remove from the box.

And the political climate around trans men is so intense because the patriarchy is horrified that women would take their reproductive systems and hang them up, get hysterectomies, removing ovaries (or not), but certainly removing tubes and cervix.  The appeal of a personal penis is less intense for trans men than trans women, quite possibly because the outcomes are not as good, but also nobody is checking their pants to see if they are men…

Many trans women leave their ovaries in place to avoid the horrible life commitment that taking hormones involves.  This means their bodies continue to produce oestrogen unless they suppress it, and they continue to experience a cycle even though they no longer menstruate.  It also preserves their ability to produce eggs and therefore one day to possibly have children.

It is hard not to see the appeal of this to many women.  Patriarchal society sucks for most women…this is a a total FU.  An opt out.  And the conservative political man is shocked and horrified, for He believes He owns the reproductive capacity of women.  We are into a world that looks scarily like a total control of reproduction.  What’s next, selection of who breeds with who so that we can “improve” genetic outcomes?  I am reminded how some US states still retain the right to prevent the handicapped from having offspring.  Sick.

Well, what does all of this have to do with depression and my own sanity?

The fear and enormity of what I have undertaken is catching up to me.  Thank goodness my Dr. and her team told me that the three-month mark post-op is the hardest from a mental health perspective.  I hope she’s right because my world is falling apart.  Fear for the future.  Fear that I will never shake my dysphoria—spoiler alert, I probably won’t.

For one, being misgendered does actually suck.  It didn’t bother me so much when I was pre-op, even if I made an effort to go out looking my best.  I’m still bowled over by how in Italy I am often gendered correctly even when I “dress more like a man” in jeans and a t-shirt for instance.  But now that I have a vulva and a birth certificate and legal documents, all the effort that I have made, I don’t like it at all when someone says ‘sir’ to me.  I correc them every time.

Second, I haven’t a clue of what it means to be a woman.  I have decided, however, what it will mean to me. And this scares me even more.  It is to have sex appeal in the way that a woman does—to be able to attract…and while I would like to attract women exclusively, the fact is that men hit on me now and I don’t know whether they are straight or gay.  If I sense they are gay, I push back immediately.  If they seem straight, I flirt with them, because it feels safe.  Very strange.

But I just want to embody this female power, to experience ownership of that which the patriarchy seeks to stifle.  It is a tall order I have set myself.  For, once mastered, I can go off grid.  Will it happen?  I don’t know, but the path towards it is a tough one, even if fun to travel it.

The enormity of this task, and fear of failure are feeding this depression.  Another thing is too.  Being here near my surgeon for so long, being in an apartment that feels like a cocoon or a womb, having so much attention paid to me, and having the people I love around me, feeding me, caring for me…I’ll say it, it was like being a baby.  And we know how delicious that feels.

But my time is at an end.  It is time to go home, to return to Italy, to welcome my children back into the family home.  Can’t wait.  But it also means that this birth process is over, and I have a world to face.  I am so grateful for the time I have had here.  Feeling so utterly privileged.  But I am also terrified of what next.

And that fear feeds depression.  That I’ll never this, never that.  Life is scary again.  My economic future is very uncertain and there is not much I can do about it.  But I will be starting over from scratch.  Starting a business with the small bit of capital I have left after divorce is perhaps my only chance, since it appears that she has successfully stolen “our” business.

Fear for the future isn’t enough to create depression.  What creates depression is that we feel impotent to solve our own problems, or that no effort feels worth it.  And this stems from our deepest fears.  I guess I could set the bar for myself really low, and just go into subsistence mode…but I don’t want that.

What do I want?  I want to fly as a trans woman.  I’d like to achieve at least as much success as I achieved as a vanilla man in a man’s world.  At least.  But the fear that provokes depression is that I am not enough.  And that is what I need to work on…and the ‘not enough’ is in relation to what I have become/am becoming—a sexy woman—and finding that this is validated outside of me.

This is a big one.  Let’s see how it goes.